


Blood Moon Rising

by rosabelle



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-15
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2019-11-18 13:25:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18121544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosabelle/pseuds/rosabelle
Summary: Soon, the full moon will rise again.Hama waits.





	Blood Moon Rising

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ambyr](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambyr/gifts).



Their prisons cannot hold her.

If Hama remains here, it is only because it suits her for now. She hasn't decided where to go next. No doubt they will have burned the inn by now, as if they can cleanse her from their memory so easily.

Closing her eyes, Hama settles on her cot and listens. Her cell is deep underground and dark and even so, she can feel the presence of the moon. Today she feels nothing, no thrum of power surging in her blood nor even the whisper of the moon. It must be a new moon, and daylight. Outside, the sun is high overhead. 

In the South Pole, she was not so beholden to the turns of the sun and the moon. There was water aplenty, even in the arctic summer when the midnight sun ruled above. 

Hama does not regret taking in the children. She'd meant to pass them by. They were too absorbed in their tales; if they'd heard her, they would've thought her footsteps to be the manifestation of some spirit from the stories. But then she'd heard the girl's voice, and the story of Nini.

Kanna's granddaughter resembles her so. Meeting her stirred something long dormant in Hama, and gave her a purpose beyond exacting revenge on the Fire Nation: the chance to save Katara.

The Fire Nation robbed Hama of the chance to have children of her own, and they took the life of Kanna's daughter. To have the chance to ensure that Kanna's grandchildren live is a gift. Hama hopes that one day Katara will see it that way as well.

Powerful though she is--and she is very powerful indeed, another thing that brings Hama joy--Katara is still young, and she sees things through a child's eyes. Katara does not yet understand that Hama has given her a gift. Katara will never need to languish in a cell as Hama did for all those years, painstakingly developing the means to free herself, because Hama has already taught it to her.

Whatever happens now--whether Hama lives out the rest of her days in this little cell where her food is lowered in from above by a rope and pulley so that the guards, cowards that they are, don't have to face her, or whether she walks free at the next full moon--what is done is done.

She thinks the children have given her a gift as well.

All those years in prison, she'd had time to think of what her life would be like after. She'd meant, always, to go home to her quiet village. Only when she'd realized that she was the only Southern waterbender to have survived had her plans changed.

She sees now that she was wrong. Water is life, and life finds its way. There are still waterbenders in the Southern Water Tribe, and soon, the full moon will rise.

Hama awaits it with renewed purpose.


End file.
